SOURCE: "Swift's Yahoo and the Christian Symbols for Sin," in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. XV, No. 2, April, 1954, pp. 201-17.

Below, Frye discusses ways that Swift's characterization of the Yahoos reflects eighteenth-century Protestant dogma equating the misuse and abuse of reason with sin.

I

Swift's treatment of the Yahoo in the fourth book of Gulliver's Travels has been the center of a prolonged critical controversy. Involving and epitomizing as it does the so-called "misanthropy" of Swift, this controversy has a significance which extends beyond the particular work in question, although that is significant enough in itself. Merrel D. Clubb, who has traced the history of the controversy, writes that "the longer one studies Swift, the more obvious it becomes that the interpretation and verdict to be placed on the 'Voyage to the Houyhnhnms' is, after all, the central problem of Swift criticism."1